


Miniatures

by Kit



Category: Monster Blood Tattoo Series - D. M. Cornish
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-14
Updated: 2010-09-14
Packaged: 2017-10-11 19:48:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/116286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kit/pseuds/Kit





	Miniatures

The Bookchild had already been small. Prostrate, tears sizzled out to salt on his cheeks, his fingers curled tight and white from the violent arching, he was a pathetic creature, and the Branden Rose had found her heart pounding as much from _this_ sad effort as it had from standing down the ettin, whose grip she could still feel fast about her ribs, proofing and all.  Her heart, she thought sourly, had stopped entire at the sight of the boy: wretched-weeping, his mewling fresh-blended with the creature’s cries as she wrestled and struck from its now frazzled grasp.

“You have never... _hessitated_ ,” Licurius. A voice ever unchanging and at her back, low and sibilant around the scents that made his olfactory shadow: leatherwork and leerchemistry and the faintest, entirely ordinary tinge of wood polish.

“You do like an unflinching woman.” Europe shrugged one shoulder, the words dull in her mouth as she leant forward to brush hair, thick with static, from the child’s brow. She stiffened as her factotum laid a hand on her, but did not cease her own caress.

 _Hiss._ “It is...part of our time together...iss it not?” The duchess-daughter closed her eyes as the falseman kept on, her fingers sliding from Rossamünd’s flesh and into the cool, waiting earth beneath them, twisting snare-grass into knots. A childhood habit, torturing the mother’s grounds at Naimes.   She sighed.

“What is, Box Face? Rescuing foolish children only to lay them out? Are we ashdabblers, now?”

“Your... _hiss_...celerity.” The leer stepped away from her, to prowl slowly around both her form and that of the child’s, the air rattling through him, his bound head low. “It’ss immaterial if you _feel_ , afterwardss, when you always _do_ sso well, firsst.”

Europe jerked, hazel-eyes darkening steadily as she looked at the man, knowing well enough that the dabbler would be getting a picture out of it:  some twisting, writhing darkness gone widdershins in his brain; spewed out into miniature portrait-paper and all caught from the rage in her face. He would show it to her later, enjoying the horror of illustrating the fulgar snatches of what she was, to a falseman. She shivered.   “Quiet, now. You’ve never been any good at patronising me, leer.” She squared her shoulders, faced the burden before her.  “The brat is too still,” she muttered. “It was only a _little_ jolt—”




“— _Too_ little.”

“You call for infanticide? You _are_ my mother’s man after all, darling.”

“She would... _hiss..._ be proud.”

“And so,” quipped the Branden Rose,  “I am _not_ having _that_. Oh, where _is_ that satchel. I’ll never get anything done wringing my hands, here.”

“I... _hiss_....hold that _something_ must be done.” The leer was behind her again, coat rustling softly, his heartbeat—his ordinary, everyman heartbeat—thunder in her ears. Fighting weather, and still her words stuck and tasted ill. It had been years since she had seen Licurius’s eyes. _Ten_. _Had it been a decade, since he had them in his face?_ Almost as long and strung out as the life of the boy on the ground by her knees.

“I...  I have _done_ enough, don’t you think?”


End file.
